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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28290195">The Price of Monsters</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merkwerkee/pseuds/Merkwerkee'>Merkwerkee</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Void Jumpers (Web Series)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Dysfunctional Family, Vampires</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 02:02:03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,852</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28290195</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merkwerkee/pseuds/Merkwerkee</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Tag sees Bryn in full feeding frenzy as a vampire. Smelling a rat, he confronts his father who admits to doing it because he thought it would be funny.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Price of Monsters</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Tag blinked as ice water ran down his spine.</p><p>It had seemed funny, at first. They’d all been riding high off the thrill of victory - Sam especially, the man mugging for the crowd until the last possible second and crowing about his victories on their way back to the ready room - and the exchange between Bryn and their ready man had been frankly hilarious. <em>Can I bite your calf</em>, with that serious look on her face that Tag had seen her use before when trying to be diplomatic. <em>Can I bite your calf</em>, and clearly the ready man had no idea what she was talking about - his once-over had been about as subtle as their landing on the Bloom planet, and he’d gone with her behind a screen readily enough. Rex had snickered rudely, which had set the rest of them off and they’d stood there and dripped saltwater and laughed. It’d felt good, the kind of laugh that was as much about relief as about how funny the joke was, and the acid burns - plus the lingering taste of Malice in the back of his throat - had become somewhat secondary to the bubble of relief that they’d managed to come through this test without anyone nearly dying…before the screaming had started.</p><p>It was the kind of awful, terrible scream that only came from a person who had no brain power to spare from trying to stay alive. The kind of scream that took as much air as you had in your lungs because it <em>had </em>to be heard and never mind about the quality. The kind of scream that signaled somebody was dying.</p><p>Tag had never heard anything like it before - Cylvahl Cylesso had never been boring by any means, but it hadn’t been this kind of interesting either - but there was no mistaking it for what it was. Before any of them could react, the privacy screen came crashing down as the ready man - they’d been calling him Danny but Tag had no idea if that was his actual name - fell backwards through it with Bryn right beside him. A long, crescent-shaped slash ran down Danny’s leg and Tag could see the wet gleam of yellow bone and red muscle in the light of the lamps. Blood splattered the floor as Bryn snarled, a sound so utterly <em>inhuman </em>it struck Tag to his core. That, that wasn’t right; between the two of them, <em>he </em>was the monster, the Hunger hidden in human form. Bryn was his anchor, his touchstone for his own humanity, she shouldn’t - she <em>couldn’t </em>be this hungry beast with blood dripping down her chin and a flat, dangerous look in her eyes.</p><p>It was wrong in the worst of ways, and Tag could feel the blood drain out of his own face as he ran forward blindly. “Bryn, stop, don’t - ” he began, trying to get a hold on her to pull her away. He wasn’t thinking, couldn’t see past the red, red blood; he didn’t know what he would do, once he got her away from her chosen prey, but he couldn’t just let her kill an innocent in front of him. It would - he <em>knew </em>Bryn, knew her on a level that most people never had the chance to know another person, and he knew that if she was in her right mind then she wouldn’t want to kill an innocent either.</p><p>Of course, that didn’t stop her from backhanding him away <em>now</em>. The force of the blow nearly lifted him off his feet in a way that almost reminded him of the last time Rex had clapped him on the shoulder, back on Haven. He didn’t know if it was the magic of the amulet she wore, or a side effect of the single-minded intensity she was displaying in going after Danny, but the power in her strike just reminded him of how far away from normal they’d come. Tag staggered as Bryn rushed past him and sank her fangs into Danny’s throat, blood fountaining from the wound and joining the other mysterious stains on their clothing. Tag just barely managed to keep his feet and set himself to lunge for Bryn once more to try and pry her off as Danny’s screaming stopped with a sickening gurgle and even more unsettling gulping sounds filled the room.</p><p>And then Rex’s shield hit him in the face.</p><p>Tag went down in a heap, his head <em>ringing </em>like the gong that had signaled the start of the last round. It was so <em>loud</em>, he couldn’t think around the noise; the pain crackled in his head and mixed unpleasantly with the feeling of the raw skin left from where the spider’s acidic blood had eaten away his epidermis. Things were happening around him, events unfolding before his eyes, but he couldn’t <em>think</em>, couldn’t process around the ringing in his brain. A swirl of magic in the course of events produced a kind of kaleidoscopic effect, and Tag could almost <em>feel </em>himself drift away from his body for a moment in a way that he hadn’t since he’d put on the amulet.</p><p>Tag blinked and forcibly re-centered himself, shaking his head in a way he immediately regretted as the pain in his cranium doubled. Now was <em>not </em>the time for floating away; he had to be <em>present</em>, in this moment, so he could help stop Bryn from eating Danny…who was lying not two feet away and no longer bleeding all over the place? Tag blinked at the shorter man as he moaned a little bit, then extended a shaky hand to give him a clumsy pat on the shoulder. Danny didn’t seem to be actively dying at the moment, so to Tag’s still somewhat scrambled mind it was up to him to make sure Bryn hadn’t permanently maimed the guy.</p><p>“Hey man, you got into a, a bad situa- you got into a bad little mix-up right there, but you’re okay. Hey, hey, hey, hey, Danny- DANNY.” Tag’s voice got louder than he’d intended on the last two words, and he flinched away from the sound as much as Danny did.</p><p>“Eh. Eh? What? Yeah, yeah,” Danny waved a vague hand, and Tag felt a wave of relief sweep through him at the somewhat weak response. Danny wasn’t dead, or being actively killed, and that was good.</p><p>“You’re okay.”</p><p>“What happened?”</p><p>Tag felt his brain kick into overdrive as words came spilling out of his mouth without stopping to check in with his brain first. “Uh, nothing to worry about. You’re gonna be - you’re healthy. Well, you’re not dying, you won’t BE dead. I am <em>horrible </em>at these speeches, I just, I’m tryin’ ta just…it’s cool. Bro.”</p><p>Tag consciously forced himself to stop talking, nearly biting his own tongue with his efforts, and gave Danny a thumbs-up instead. The other man returned it somewhat weakly, and Tag turned his attention back to the rest of the room just in time to see Rex yelling at Bryn. The ringing in his ears had finally abated to the point where he could actually distinguish other sounds again, and his brain finally up to the task of actually processing what he was hearing.</p><p>“You were biting his neck!”</p><p>Bryn looked uncomfortable, eyes sliding away from her teammates and back towards were Danny lay mostly comatose on the floor.</p><p>“That was - I don’t know what happened there.” Bryn’s voice wavered just the tiniest bit and she wiggled her eyebrows strangely, and Tag frowned.</p><p>The statement set off warning bells in Tag’s head. Even to his still-somewhat-addled brain, that didn’t sound right; Bryn not knowing why she was trying to do something sounded an awful lot like an external force making her try and do it - and there were only a few people not in their group in the room currently.</p><p> Schlacta was a ghost and seemed perfectly content to just take their currency for her items, it didn’t seem like she’d want to make Bryn kill someone. He glanced over to confirm and found Schlacta eating the pastel memory of popcorn while hovering over her cart, a sight that would normally have been fascinating enough to warrant a few seconds of staring but which right now just confirmed that she probably wasn’t the one influencing Bryn.</p><p>Then, of course, there was Danny himself - but Tag dismissed the thought as soon as it entered his head. The man wouldn’t have screamed if this had been some weird, elaborate suicide attempt and he very clearly had had an extremely different idea of how biting his calf was supposed to go.</p><p>Tag licked his lips as Bryn continued to stare at the prone Danny, preparing to put himself between the two if he had to, when a slick, oily sort of sweetness stole over his tongue for a moment and froze him in his tracks. The spider had been a creature of the Malice - he’d never forgotten the taste after what had happened on the Fire planet - and it had been after Bryn. Now Bryn was trying to do something he knew to be contrary to her nature, even with the curse of vampirism resting heavily on her shoulders. </p><p>Tag felt his spine stiffen in anger; <em>of course</em>, what had happened on the Water planet couldn’t have been the end of it. <em>Of course</em>, simply tearing half-dad’s crown and - his human mind stuttered at remembering what his Malice-self had done, the fleeting memory of a thousand mouths tearing apart a thousand wings echoing back into the void - couldn’t have been enough to stop the bastard. He’d just changed his targets.</p><p>Tag took a deep breath and - let go. Even with the amulet on, the Malice was always present where his soul should have been - as the ghost who had tried to possess him had found to its detriment. On some level it had always been, he simply hadn’t known it for what it was before meeting half-dad for the first time. It waited, lurking, inside of him, and to open himself up to it was as easy as breathing.</p><p>The memory-world - <em>glitched</em>. There was no other word for it. A ripple of colored static washed through everything save himself and his companions in less time than it would have taken to blink, leaving everything strangely off-colored and just the slightest bit hazy. Tag couldn’t say if that was what the phase state looked like on Blight all the time, or if this was because they were inside the chaos magic of Schalcta’s memory, and at this point he didn’t have the attention to spare to try and puzzle it out.</p><p>Because half-dad was <em>here</em>.</p><p>Tag kept his gaze steady despite the pounding in his head. Half-dad didn’t look quite as tall as he remembered him, and his crown was gone. In its place, little rivulets of Malice streamed up and off his head in a strange parody of hair and Tag felt a little flicker of triumph at the sight. It wasn’t much to his human eyes, but he could feel the way the Malice inside of him preened a little bit at the sight and knew that half-dad was steadily bleeding out his own life-essence. Even if the eldritch being replenished himself from the energies they were no doubt stealing from this planet and the others still caged, it was unmistakably a sign of weakness.</p><p>So distracted was he by half-dad’s new appearance, the taller being spoke before Tag could marshal his thoughts into words.</p><p>“Ah, excellent. The screw has been tightening, has it not, my boy?”</p><p>Tag felt his lip curl into a half-snarl, irritation bleeding into him at the smugness in half-dad’s voice.</p><p>“I don’t appreciate you getting into my friend’s heads like that,” he stated, drawing on as much composure as he could muster to keep his voice even.</p><p>“Ehhgh - I know you’re not going to like it, but it is <em>your </em>fault.”</p><p>A pulse of hot shame shot through Tag. If he wasn’t here, in this place, half-dad wouldn’t be after his friends. If he had acquiesced to what the Malice wanted of him, Bryn wouldn’t be trying to kill and eat someone. <em>If, if, if</em> - it hurt that he was the reason his friends were in danger, but not enough drive him away from them. Not here, not yet.</p><p>“I…don’t like that you’re correct, but that’s also…” his anger flared. <em>Yes</em>, refusing half-dad was on him - but half-dad was the one refusing to take no for an answer. “Such a shitty way to not take responsibility for what’s happening. I know that you don’t care about Bryn. I know that you don’t care about Danny. I know that you don’t care about <em>me </em>beyond my <em>function </em>in your <em>plan</em>,” the words were as bitter as hot ash on his tongue, but he couldn’t deny their truthfulness.</p><p>For all he called the being in front of him half-dad, it didn’t care about him as a parent should care about their offspring. The shell known as Tag had been created through some arcane means that he couldn’t think about the particulars of; it had never had a real mother or father, and Tag himself hadn’t been adopted by anyone either. It hurt too much to think about for long, so he plowed on ahead. “But you are an actor in this. At least have the courage to stand in front of me and talk about the truth.”</p><p>Half-dad made a vague gesture before sighing. “It’s - it’s difficult for me to communicate the scale at which I am forced to conceptualize your realm.” Tag knew the struggle - fitting into a limited three-dimensional human shell was not easy - but was content to remain silent instead of empathizing. Half-dad did not deserve his empathy. “You have weight there. You’ve brought some of me to them. I recognize you. The others, though I feign interest or…whatever, they, it’s, I don’t apologize to ants when I kick over their hill.”</p><p>Tag scowled. To compare his friends to ants was to do them a deep disservice - one he would not stand for. “Look, I’m not asking you to apologize. <em>No-one</em> is interested in you making this grandstanding, sinister bad-guy speech that we’ve all heard a million times about your inflated sense of grandiosity and by contrast everyone else’s minuscule function in the world. All I’m saying is,” here he stepped forward and put himself toe to toe with the heavily-armored, black-cloaked figure in front of him and stared directly into where the face should be, <em>“pick on somebody your own size.”</em></p><p>Half-dad didn’t move, but Tag got the sense of something flinching away in dimensions he couldn’t see. “Okay. I just want to say for a moment, often when I’m making these grandiose speeches I’m complimentary to you. That just - it’d be nice to get a thank you every once in a while.”</p><p>Tag didn’t even think before responding.</p><p>“No.”</p><p>The compliments half-dad gave were never about things he’d done - only about how well he was fitting into their plans. It was never about Tag, the human - it was only ever about the Malice inside of him. They were not the kind of compliments Tag would accept from anyone, but especially not from the monster that claimed to be family and yet tried to drive his friends away and force him to do something he did not want to do.</p><p>“I’m not going to thank you for your back-handed passive-aggressive attempts to manipulate me, by positioning yourself in my friends’ brains and hearts, and then saying they are so insignificant that you don’t even consider it consequential, what you are doing. It matters to me, therefore it should matter to you, you <em>dick</em>.” If they were really family, it would. If half-dad was any real relation, it would.</p><p>Half-dad paused for a single instant, and something about his posture replaced all of Tag’s aggression with foreboding. “Fair. I’ll make you a deal. Unfortunately, while I am waiting in the wings, your Summoner friend keeps appearing on my doorstep. I can’t promise I won’t welcome her when she does. However, this one instance, if you would like to exchange a favor to me, I will release the current thrall on Bryn to save your little idiot friend.”</p><p>Tag paused for only an instant. Bryn was his friend, and one of the best people he’d ever known. Whatever vampirisim was doing to her, half-dad was doing worse. She didn’t deserve the things half-dad would make her do in the name of getting to Tag; underneath the curses and magic, she was still more warmly human than Tag could hope to be. And, in truth, it was only fair - if Tag hadn’t refused half-dad, half-dad wouldn’t be trying to reach out and destroy his friends. For all his fears about what half-dad could force him to do, the choice was obvious.</p><p>Looking back up into what passed for half-dad’s eyes, Tag gave the only answer he could give:</p><p>“Okay.”</p><p>For Bryn, wholly and unreservedly, he agreed.</p>
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